“‘I nearly spat out coffee. There was only one Donald, and few called him Donald. Soon Pat guffawed as Trump held court. When Trump called me, always to complain, there were just bad words.

“‘What the hell?’ I said when Pat hung up.

“‘We hit it off yesterday.’ Before Pat became a business reporter, Trump treated him like the rest of us. Now they were BFFs?

“Trump called several times a week. Pat’s just-the-facts Ledger reporting style served him. He was masterful at never adding innuendo, or attitude, or his own voice to a story. Everything went right down the middle. It was all Trump could handle.”

Chris Roush is the Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.